Retro Achievements Unmastered 3 - Final Fantasy 8

Final Fantasy 8 is a very special game that I had never played, once, in my entire life. I own it, though. It fascinated me, so I picked it up hoping to get to it, but it took me probably about 13 years. This is a special one in the Final Fantasy Ouvre, because it’s extremely divisive. There are a lot of people who love it, consider it their favorite in the entire series. There’s also a lot of people who haaate it. It’s a bit of a blacksheep, the one to skip. As I play games on stream, I also read contemporary reviews of games, and there were some scaaathing ones for this one. When I was an impressionable younger kid, reading those reviews but not playing the game, I agreed with them. This game is the worst in the series, I said, until 13 came out and I played that. Then it was the 2nd worst. But now I played it. I have formed my own opinions. And my thoughts?

I think I like Final Fantasy 8 more than 7.

With THAT controversial take out of the way, let’s get right into it!

Final Fantasy 8 is a very ambitious video game. It’s unique in Final Fantasy in many, many ways, all of which I will try to get to. Unique doesn’t neccesarily mean good, but you can respect the effort for a lot of them. There are a LOT of things to get to that FF8 does differently from both its immediate predecessor, and every other game in the series, but I think the first thing I want to talk about is mechanics.

Final Fantasy 8 introduces the Junction System. So, in universe, there are these things called GFs. Guardian Forces, I think, but we just kept calling them girlfriends, because it made for some very, VERY funny moments, like when the final boss exclaimed that they were using the MOST POWERFUL GIRLFRIEND. In game terms, this is a summon, essentially. These summons have their own levels and stats that they gain alongside you, and you “junction”, or equip, them to a character. The game has no other equipment aside from that, except for a minor weapon system that is less buying weapons and more crafting upgrades to them.

Each girlfriend also has their own abilities they can learn. These are things like stuff to help when they’re summoned, active abilities like Mug or Darkside, Cecil’s power from FF4. Passive abilities, like Encnone, allowing you to bypass all random encounters. Stat abilities, boosting stats or letting you gain stats when you level up, WE’LL GET TO IT. And finally, most importantly, magic junction abilities. These are ones called like “Mag”, or “Vit”. These will allow you to junction magic to a character in that stat if they have this GF junctioned. So, you equip the GF as armor basically, giving abilities, but also the ability to equip more things to increase stats. Make sense? You can equip magic you get onto these stats, increasing them based on the magic you choose, and the amount. Some magic is better for stats than others. Life and Cure spells are good for health and defense stats, while big damage spells like Flare and Meteor are good for Strength and MAgic.

How do you GET these spells though? Well, that’s where the Draw system comes into play. Each enemy has some spells that they have equipped. You can then select the Draw ability, which is equipped via GF like any other ability, and you can draw those spells from that enemy to your personal stash. You can ALSO just up and cast them, good in a pinch, but they’re weaker this way. The amount drawn depends on your magic stat, from 1 to 9. This means on average, with a cap of 100, you will be drawing about 20 times for one spell, but more than likely only 11. This can be tedious sounding, and it kinda is, but it’s extremely important to be able to do anything.

You may be going, wow Liz, this sounds confusing. And it kinda is! This is the biggest hurdle to getting into FF8, because this system is REQUIRED to do ANYTHING. FF8 doesn’t increase your stats as you level up as much as most FF games do, and it doesn’t matter too, because as you level up, so do enemies. You need to constantly be swapping out Junctions as you progress with better spells, so you can keep up. And when you get to points where you need to swap characters, it gets VERY clunky. This system is, straight up, jank. Not to mention that it disincentivizes using magic, as it’ll lower your stats. But it’s also kinda fun?

It makes it kinda like FF7 where any character can be anything. You have base stats, but then you can fit them however you want. This is cool, and really fun to break. But if you dunno what you’re doing, it’s kinda frustrating. And even if you DO know what you’re doing, the clunkiness can get to you. Over all I felt it was a plus, though, and I respected them trying something new with this system.

I should also mention with the gameplay is the limit break system. In FF6, limit breaks happened randomly when you were low on health. They took that system and changed it completely for FF7, giving you a bar and once it filled up, forcing you to limit break. FF8 returns to the FF6 format. The more fucked up your character is, the higher a chance of their limit break happening, and the better it is. Lower health, more status effects. These use no magic, and aren’t super long winded, though they are y’know, long unskippable cutscenes, they’re not at bad as the summons, which I’ll get to. This is, by far, the best way to deal damage. But this also means you need to try and stay hovering at low health for a lot of fights to get em done faster, which is hectic.

I also wanna talk about the summons. A lot of reviews I read said that the best and only way to fight enemies, cause normal combat is so weak and slow paced, is to just spam summons. But summons have like, minute long summoning cutscenes. There’s no real reason NOT to use them, they’re just slow. You choose to summon one, then you have like, a backwards ATB meter that counts down, and a Summon health bar. If that health bar goes down, the summon doesn’t come out. Then you watch a long-ass cutscene, and then they deal like, okay damage. No cost, nothing. Now, I used summons maybe four times in the entire game. Once to see what they were like, twice for an actual effect (doom train reduces enemy defense), and once to see what the final summons animation was. It’s 30 seconds longer than Knights of the Round in FF7 and is absolutely fucking nuts.

The summon system feels unneccesary and not super great, and I dunno what all those magazines were whining about. I think they just didn’t get the Junction system and weren’t playing very well.

ONE LAST gameplay thing, and that’s mini games. So, Final Fantasy games love their little minigames. Small gameplay things that don’t make any sense and barely fit into the world. FF7 had so fucking many of them. You snowboarded down a slope after burying your dead friend. Does FF8 have anything like that? Well, only one, but it’s built into the entire game, and that’s Triple Triad. It’s a pretty fun and well made card game, I like Triple Triad. And you can abuse those cards you win by modding them into good magic and items, which is cool as hell. If you wanna min-max like crazy, you are going to be VERY familiar with Triple Triad. I just got all the cards. It was a lot of card games.

Next, let’s talk character and story. The main character of our game is Squall Leonhart. All my life, I heard the following. “It’s kinda public opinion that Cloud is an emotionless emo boy, but that’s not true. SQUALL is that, not Cloud”. I’ve now played this game and once again, much like Cloud, I feel like people only look at the surface and the first 10 minutes and decide that’s just what Squall is for the entire game. Now I’m curious to finish FF13 and find out if Lightning actually grows as a character.

Squall is a dork. He’s an anti-social teenager who responds “whatever” to things, but he’s actually just a fucking dork. It doesn’t help that we made his personality “extremely not into anything anyone else is doing, unless it fits his interests, which is card games” as a joke. He’s bad at communication, but is thrust into a leadership position rather suddenly, which he didn’t seem to want or care that much about. But he’s not emo, and he’s not emotionless, and he’s not a bad character at all. And by the end as you see him evolve, it’s great. In the final cutscene he calls out for his friends to help him. That feels like a minor thing, but that’s the culmination of his character development, it’s wonderful.

Squall is a child mercenary working for SeeD. SeeD is a special class of mercenary, trained by the three Gardens in the world. He’s joined by his fellow mercenaries from his garden, Quistis, one of the teachers who’s also a SeeD, his classmate Zell, a meathead who has Tifa’s moveset. They also meet Selphie, a slightly unhinged airhead from another Garden, and Irvine, the rootin’ tootin’ playboy cowboy from the last Garden, who’s actually extremely insecure and anxious about everything. It’s a good cast. But of course, we’re missing one more major character.

This is Rinoa, the plucky but kind of in-over-her-head leader of an underground resistance group fighting against The Evil Empire. She hires Squall and his group to help her fight against the Empire, and that’s one of the big things this game does differently to most other Final Fantasy games. This game IS about typical final fantasy stuff, fighting evil empires and stopping a world ending calamity. But at its core, it’s a love story. It’s about romance between Squall and Rinoa. And at first I was like “These two? Yeah right”. And it felt a little forced and heavy handed. But honestly? By the scene where they’re dying in space, stranded in space suits (yes really), I REALLY felt it. It was good. And Rinoai s a really cute character. She kinda looks like someone wanted to just make Tifa again, but has mild prosopagnosia, but that’s fine. Character wise she’s cute. Also her limit breaks use her dog Angelo! Angelo no joke has the most broken limit breaks, and he saved the galaxy by defeating the final boss with his “make everyone invincible for a minute” ability.

The villain is interesting too, as a comparison to Sephiroth. I really didn’t care for Sephiroth very much. Didn’t find him interesting, and he basically wasn’t in 80% of the game. Our villain here is a fun contrast cause she’s also kinda like that. Kinda. But not. See, the villain Ultimecia feels like a late game reveal of “this is the bad guy all along”, but her fingers and influence has been felt for the entire game in a way I appreciate. The final dungeon is Kinda Fucked, but over all I liked her presence. And she’s got a great final boss. Halfway through the game you name Squall’s lion he has on his ring, and I named it “Liony the Lion” as a joke. Anyways Liony the Lion became the final boss and it fucking floored me.

Next let’s talk graphics. This game looks STUNNINGLY good for 1999 PS1. Like, yes, parts of it are chunky and look rough, like “best looking guy here” Squall up there. But over all, the in game graphics are quite good, and they move into FMV in a really seamless way that blew my mind multiple times with super cool sequences. And speaking of which, that FMV?

Really godo for the 90s. You can see some parts where it looks weird, or unnatural, but over all, it genuinely looks fantastic, and blew me away almost every time. Aesthetically, this game is on point. It’s also unique aesthetically. FF7 kinda mixed fantasy and sci-fi, but this is FULL on sci-fi, and it looks cool as hell.

The music is also really good. Not as good as FF7, I think, over all. But it’s got lots of great tracks. That final boss theme, The Extreme? Holy moly. Here’s the theme, by the way. It’s great cause it’s a surprise final boss phase after what seems like it was the last one, so it’s calm and peaceful as you’re like “Phew, it’s finally over”. AND THEN IT FUCKING KICKS IN. Head bangs the entire time.

One of those contemporary reviews I read about this game claimed that FF8 had the worst soundtrack of the entire series, and that it was a travesty, with no good songs at all. Look, no FF game has a bad soundtrack. Some have less standouts than others. But you cannot tell me the game with THIS SONG

is the worst Final Fantasy soundtrack out there. FF4’s soundtrack is way, way more boring. FF4 does not have a Shuffle or Boogie.

Anyways yeah, don’t have much more to add. I think FF8 is clunky, and kind of a mess, but in a way that I GREATLY enjoyed and had a lot of fun with. It’s a mixed bag, but I understand what people see in it now.

Really excited to play 9, because I know SO little about 9 over all.